Astronauts could soon be waking up to the smell of freshly baked bread. A new dough mixture and oven specially designed for use on the International Space Station will be tested during a mission next year.

It’s an ambitious goal. Bread is a staple food on Earth but can be life-threatening in space. The first and last people to enjoy bread in space were the two astronauts on NASA’s 1965 Gemini 3 mission, who shared a corned beef sandwich one of them had smuggled on board. The crumbs flew everywhere in the microgravity and could have got into their eyes or into the electrical panels, where they could have started a fire. Bread has been banned ever since – tortilla wraps are the accepted alternative.

It’s a recurring horror in sci-fi: the hull is pierced, a human is trapped without equipment in an airlock about to open, a door needs to be opened in order to expel something undesirable. With no air and almost zero pressure, the human body isn’t going to last long without some form of protection. But what does happen, exactly? Do your eyes explode outward while your blood evaporates? Well, no. The truth is both less dramatic and far more fascinating — as we have discovered through accidents in space and in test chambers, and animal experimentation in the 1960s. The first thing you would notice is the lack of air. You wouldn’t lose consciousness straight away; it might take up to 15 seconds as your body uses up the remaining oxygen reserves from your bloodstream, and — if you don’t hold your breath — you could perhaps survive for as long as two minutes without permanent injury.